Folk-Rockers Fleet Foxes Play Mountain Park Sept. 25

September 21, 2011|By ERIC R. DANTON, edanton@courant.com

Fleet Foxes has spent plenty of time traveling the usual indie-rock buzz-band circuit, with gigs up and down the east and west coasts: Boston, New York, Philly, D.C.; or Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A., with a handful of major markets in the middle. But some of the group's best shows have come in unexpected places.

"The most fun show that we've played so far on this tour was in Tulsa," singer Robin Pecknold says by phone from Jacksonville, Fla., on an outing that stops Sunday in Holyoke. "You feel the least amount of pressure. When you play a show in Los Angeles or Seattle or New York, it feels like — there's something about it, maybe press will be there, but it feels like you're playing it for the whole world. But when you come to Jacksonville or Tulsa, it feels like it's for the people who are there moreso than in some of the major markets. It's more fun."

Fleet Foxes knows from pressure.

The Seattle-born group (Pecknold has since moved to Portland, Ore.) stirred up immediate buzz with the release in 2008 of the band's debut EP. A self-titled full-length effort later that year won plaudits basically everywhere: hipster music website Pitchfork gave "Fleet Foxes" a 9.0 (out of 10) rating, calling the album "surprisingly full and wide ranging" on the strength of the band's folky rock sound and lush vocal harmonies.

Naturally the acclaim heightened expectations for this year's follow-up, "Helplessness Blues." Pecknold says he tried not to think about it as he wrote songs for the album, to which he contributed vocals, guitar, fiddle, harmonium, hammer dulcimer, harp and a handful of old-school analog synthesizers. (Listen to this Sound Check podcast on the album, and download this mp3 of the title track.)

"You hope that your criteria for something being good or not aren't affected by what people thought of your first record," he says. "You hope it's the same, or developing independently of that other stuff. But I definitely felt pressure to make something good that wasn't a complete waste of everyone's time."

He and the band succeeded. "Helplessness Blues" received an equally rapturous reception, thanks to sweeping songs by turns wistful and hopeful, full of harmony and vivid, poignant lyrical imagery. Although Fleet Foxes' sound often reminds listeners of a specific time — generally the late '60s and '70s — Pecknold is more interested in summoning a sense of place.

"I think you want music to evoke some kind of landscape or something, or to be visually suggestive," he says. "Some of the songs on the new one, I think I was thinking about Big Sur somewhat and areas around Seattle as a visual backdrop for those. But then then there's a song called 'The Plains" that's supposed to evoke the desert, and 'The Shrine' takes place at a Japanese garden. It's sort of all over the place."

Whatever the setting, they're songs drawn from Pecknold's own life, experiences and emotions.

"On the first record, there was a little bit of couching something in so much storywriting that it became unrecognizable, folding some event in my life into a lyric that obscured that thing to anyone else," he says. "But on this one, I feel like it's all pretty explicitly autobiographical, or if it's more lyrical, then it's about a person or something, a person that I know, but put into a different context."

Writing autobiographically feels to Pecknold like a natural progression.

"I've been writing songs since I was 14, writing lyrics and everything, and most 14 year olds really have no idea about anything," says Pecknold, 25. "So the songs that I would write when I was a teenager were just straight-up fiction, you know? I'd just come up with some sad story about something that never happened, because you have nothing else to say. But I feel like as I get older, it's more fun and feels more natural to put myself in the song as much as possible."

Fleet Foxes performs with the Walkmen Sunday, Sept. 25, at Mountain Park in Holyoke. Tickets for the 7 p.m. show are $32.50 via http://www.nbotickets.com. Information: 413-586-8686 or http://www.iheg.com.